On a trek across this Atlantic rainforest reserve in southern Brazil, biologist Michel Garey recalled how on his birthday in 2007 he chanced upon what turned out to be a new species of tiny, three-fingered frogs.

"I was doing research with two friends on a hilltop in the reserve and I stumbled into this unusual frog with only three fingers," he told a small group of reporters this week on a tour of Salto Morato, a nature preserve owned by Brazil's leading cosmetic firm Boticario.

Conservation groups expressed outrage Friday after resistance led by China and Russia stymied efforts to carve out new marine sanctuaries and protect thousands of species across Antarctica.

Hopes were high that a reserve covering 1.6 million square kilometers (640,000 square miles) would be green-lighted for the pristine Ross Sea, the world's most intact marine ecosystem.

A smog-like haze that hung over part of Alaska's Kodiak Island this week was courtesy of a volcanic eruption — 100 years ago.

The National Weather Service says strong winds and a lack of snow Tuesday helped stir up ash from the 1912 eruption of Novarupta, the largest volcanic blast of the 20th century.

Polish geologists have unearthed the largest meteorite ever found in Eastern Europe and are hoping the rare find will provide fresh clues about the composition of the Earth's inner core, they said Wednesday.

"We know the Earth's core is composed of iron, but we can't study it. Here we have a guest from outer space which is similar in structure and we can easily examine it," Professor Andrzej Muszynski told reporters in Poznan, western Poland, where the find was made public Wednesday.

Palaeontologists in China said Wednesday they had found the world's oldest flying fish, a strange, snub-nosed creature that glided over water in a bid to evade predators some 240 million years ago.

Fossils in Chinese museum collections have been dusted off, dated and categorised to reveal that the flying fish is a much older creature than thought, the palaeontologists wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Was Hurricane Sandy caused by climate change?

This was the contention Tuesday of Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York state, which bore the brunt of the superstorm.

Scientists say the Martian soil at the rover Curiosity's landing site contains minerals similar to what's found on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano.

The finding released Tuesday is the latest step in trying to better understand whether the environment could have been hospitable to microbial life.

When Linda Bugbee's husband suggested traveling to the South Pacific to see a total solar eclipse, she was more enthusiastic about the cruise and visiting Tahiti than she was about seeing a celestial phenomenon.

Seven years later, Linda and George Bugbee, who live in Virginia, are embarking on their fourth trip to see a solar eclipse — this time in Australia, in November — but they still consider themselves "newbies."

The storm called Sandy messily morphed from hurricane into hybrid storm, losing the hurricane part of its name, but not the weather mayhem surrounding it.

The National Hurricane Center officially pronounced the storm "post-tropical" Monday evening, as the center of Sandy perched 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Atlantic City, knocking at the coast's door. The change is part of a transition into a more diffuse storm that is bigger and sloppier, even as its force weakened.

Shark brains have been found to share several features with those of humans, a discovery which Australian researchers believe could be crucial to developing "repellents" for the killer great white species.

Great white sharks, otherwise known as white pointers and made famous by the horror movie "Jaws", have killed an unprecedented number of surfers and swimmers off Australia's west coast in the past year.